Robert Hooks

The screen work funded the real project. Robert Hooks, born in Washington DC in 1937 as Bobby Dean Hooks, is an actor, producer and activist, and the most consequential thing he did was institutional. With Douglas Turner Ward and Gerald S. Krone he founded the Negro Ensemble Company, and on his own he founded the D.C. Black Repertory Company and New York's Group Theatre Workshop. Those companies launched careers across every discipline and assembled a body of African American theatrical writing that had not previously existed in one place.

The filmography reads like the working life that pays for that. His earliest credit here is Jeff Ward in the 1967 police series N.Y.P.D., and from there he did the full circuit of American television across four decades: Petrocelli, WKRP in Cincinnati, John Mays in Backstairs at the White House, Blacke's Magic, Cassie & Co., Head of the Class, M.A.N.T.I.S. and L.A. Dragnet.

On film he is usually the man with the authority and often, by the casting habits of the period, the only Black man in the room: Admiral Morrow in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, the Starfleet officer whose job is to tell Kirk no; Eddie in Airport '77; Dwight Henderson in Passenger 57; Lieutenant Clark in Fled; and King David in Posse, a western built to correct the record about who actually rode the American frontier.

The credits here run from 1967 into the 2000s. What they cannot show is the other ledger, the actors and playwrights whose first paid job came out of a company he built.